Ernst Gombrich discusses the concept of cultural history with Peter
Burke
BURKE: Cultural history has as many definitions as
culture, and that's a notoriously vague concept. I think it might be convenient,
though, to describe cultural history, briefly, as the history of the ideas and
artefacts of a given social group, and of the place of those ideas and artefacts
in that group's way of life. I think an interest in this kind of history goes
back to the later 18th century, but the classic study of cultural history is
surely Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy,
published in 1860. In it, he described the leading attitudes and values of the
Renaissance man, with particular emphasis on his individualism.
There have been a few outstanding cultural
historians since Burckhardt's day, and one was a Dutchman, Johan Huizinga,
best-known for his Waning of the Middle Ages, a study of the ideals of the upper
classes in France and Flanders in the 14th and 15th centuries. Then there was
the American historian, Arthur Lovejoy, and the German, Aby Warburg, who was
interested, in particular, in the history of the Classical tradition. Warburg
founded an institute for the study of cultural history: this institute is now in
London and its present director is Sir Ernst
Gombrich.Sir Ernst is well-known for the
variety of his interests - from the psychology of perception to Neoplatonism. A
few years ago, he published a lecture which we might very well take as our
starting-point for tonight's discussion: In Search of Cultural History. It was a
critique of Burckhardt and of Huizinga. Gombrich suggested that cultural history
had been built on Hegelian foundations: that it had been built on Hegel's idea
that an age or people had a spirit which expressed itself, or objectified
itself, in art, in religion, in law and so on, and that these foundations had
crumbled. The age doesn't have a spirit, and the argument that it does is
circular: the spirit of the Renaissance is first derived from Renaissance art,
and then it's used to explain Renaissance art. At the same time, he emphasised
that we need cultural history so that we can continue to understand great works
of art and great books. Sir Ernst, I'd
like to say how strongly I agree with some of the points you made in your
lecture and with two in particular. First, the need for cultural history - more
than ever today, when, as you say, 'our own past is moving away from us at
frightening speed '; and secondly, what you call the chastening insight that no
culture can be mapped out in its entirety, while no element of this culture can
be understood in isolation. But I'm a
bit more optimistic about the future of cultural history than I think you are. I
don't think that the cultural historian is condemned to be either a
metaphysician or an antiquarian; Burckhardt and Huizinga escaped both dangers. I
suppose the cultural historian does need to justify his existence to the
specialist art historians, or to the historians of science. To do this, to
justify his existence as a kind of historical general practitioner, I don't
think he needs the spirit of the age. But he does need to argue that there are
some connections between art and literature and religion in a given society. He
needs a model, if you like, of mutual interaction between painters, poets and
priests. GOMBRICH: I entirely agree that
there are some interactions. Nobody, I think, would ever doubt this. My first
question is rather whether the cultural historian should be confined to the
topics which you've just mentioned - art, literature and so on - and whether he
should be afraid of being called an antiquarian. There are antiquarian topics
which I personally find very interesting - the history of implements, the
history of certain institutions - which tell us a lot about the way of life of
the past, and which do not neatly fit into any of the categories you mentioned.
I have the honour of being a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and I think
that the antiquarian tradition, particularly in this country, has some very
positive sides. If I may quote, not an antiquarian, but a great scientist, J. B.
S. Haldane once wrote a book Everything has a history; and this seems a very
good motto for a budding cultural
historian.Continued at gombrich.com
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Posted: Tue - May 18, 2004 at 11:40